Media Sensationalism and Mob Mentality in India: Which Rapes Cause Outrage?

In 2012, a woman was brutally gang raped by six men on a moving bus in South Delhi while heading home with her friend from the cinema. She died of her injuries in Singapore two weeks later.

Outrage rang out across the nation — then, around the world. From candlelight vigils, mass protests, and impassioned activism, the world came to know the woman’s name as “Nirbhaya,” meaning “fearless” in Hindi. While Indian law prohibits the rape victim’s name from being published in the press, her parents later insisted that the world know her real name, “to know the girl we raised”: Jyoti Singh.

Media houses presented this as a rape that could have happened to anyone, emphasizing gory details (like the use of a blunt object to penetrate the victim, damaging her intestines and genitals), going so far as to interview the witness, who alleged the police took half an hour to take the pair to a hospital. Worse, this case faced political pressure from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who alleged that women in Congress-ruled states were unsafe.

Incidents of crimes against women were already on the rise in India in 2012, but the brutality of the rape, coupled with the fact that there was a living witness (her male friend), meant that there was no room for doubt that a rape had actually occurred in this case.

The victim’s dominant caste privilege, and that the six men who raped her to the brink of death were strangers, also meant that this case was of sufficient importance to Indian media, most of which is dominant caste-run and owned.

A year after the Nirbhaya case, the Indian government doubled the prison term for rapists to twenty years. On January 7, 2020, a judge issued death warrants for four of the woman’s attackers (one of the accused died during the trial period; another was a juvenile convict who had served the maximum imprisonment of three years). They were hanged this past March.

As far as the public was concerned, justice was served: the accused were dead, and the new BJP government had started a Nirbhaya fund “for the safety and security of women.” But a higher rape sentence is not a deterrent to rape in a country where an estimated 99 percent of rapes go unreported to law enforcement.

And for the majority of rape victims and survivors in India, whose stories don’t make national and global headlines, justice is much more elusive.

To be clear: sexual violence is an issue in India, but not for the reasons that the media might suggest.

“The rape cases that get sensationalized have certain elements [in common],” says Paromita Vohra, a documentary filmmaker and writer, whose work focuses on gender and feminist commentary. “These are usually [violent] cases that are accompanied by death. [Prominent cases] are those in which the victim dies; not the cases in which the victim survives. And there is a [perception of] rape via a stranger in the public domain that gets foregrounded, but that’s not statistically the case.”

In November 2019, 26-year-old Priyanka Reddy, a veterinary doctor from Hyderabad, was also brutally gang raped and murdered by four men. She had just met the men, whom she’d flagged down for assistance with a flat tire. Her burned body was found the next morning, identifiable only by her jewelry and clothes. The public drew immediate parallels between her case and Singh’s.

A month later, police took the four men, who had confessed to Reddy’s rape and murder, to the scene of the crime for reconstructive purposes. There, the men — who had yet to appear in court — were shot by the police after purportedly trying to flee the crime scene. Instantly, public pressure was alleviated. People took to the streets to celebrate, praising the Hyderabad police for their efforts. To them, justice had been served — and on time, for once.

Singh and Reddy’s stories are indeed tragic, but the outcome of both cases has done little to prevent future rapes — if anything at all — or to bring about systemic change in Indian society with regards to women. It remains to be seen whether this same course of perceived “justice” would play out without public outcry provoked by media sensationalism.

Flavia Agnes, a women’s rights lawyer and co-founder of Majlis, a legal aid NGO and cultural resource center based in Mumbai that focuses on women’s rights and gender advocacy, says the realities of rape are ignored when cases stir public sentiment and pressure.

“For us to say that the success of a case is only when the judge gives maximum sentencing [or] the death penalty is to give in to a demand made out of ignorance,” says Agnes. “Sensational demands are met with sensational solutions.” Additionally, Agnes believes implementing and celebrating a death penalty only deters the majority of victims from reporting their cases.

Media coverage of sexual violence in India, both domestically and globally, has ignored the vast majority of rapes. According to 2019 data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau, the perpetrators were known to the victims in 94.2 percent of registered rape cases. But these cases are practically invisible in mainstream reportage of India’s “rape crisis,” say both Agnes and Vohra, precisely because they are more frequent, with victims surviving their crimes and the details of the attacks not obscenely graphic in nature.

Global perceptions of India being “the most dangerous country for women” seem to have stuck, with reporting focused on India’s “rape problem” without exploring the how’s and why’s of how it got that way.

In 2015, a Leipzig University professor declined an internship application from an Indian male student, explaining, “We hear a lot about the rape problem in India… I have many female students in my group, so I think this attitude is something I cannot support.”

“It’s quite important that we try shifting this discussion away from trying to say there’s something civilizational or particular in asociety that causes rape,” stresses Vohra. “There’s something particular in all societies that cause rape, and that’s patriarchy.”

In a complex society like India’s — which operates on hundreds of layers, with religion, caste, gender, class, and ethnicity impacting power dynamics — patriarchy plays out multidimensionally. And these power dynamics, in turn, determine headlines — and public outrage.

“Stories in which lower-caste men rape upper-caste women are more promoted by both the public and the media, which plays into the narrative of how the marginalized-caste men are a threat to women on the whole,” says Vohra. These stories, in turn, go on to paint stereotypes of such men being “creeps.”

The idea of creating a martyr like Nirbhaya, who was raped and attacked by oppressed-caste men, subsequently serves our ideas of caste and class supremacy. We then see a certain reflection of colonial discourse, which centered the question of why Indian men rape, says Vohra.

Where rape itself is about power, with an inherent imbalance between a man and a woman in Indian society, the imbalance is further skewed when the power dynamics involve a dominant-caste man and an oppressed-caste woman.

Until the recent Hathras case, we rarely heard about caste rapes in the mainstream. This past September, in an Uttar Pradesh village, four dominant-caste Thakur men targeted and gang raped a Dalit woman on the basis of her caste, who eventually died of her injuries. But these rapes happen more often than is covered by the media — and at an alarmingly high rate.

Nearly 10 Dalit women are raped every day, according to National Crime Records Bureau data, bearing in mind that most crimes against the Dalit community often go unreported while they continue to increase, with marginal conviction rates.

“Disproportionate attention to [sensationalized] cases takes away from the more widespread cases of sexual violence,” says Vohra.

And these figures likely aren’t even close to the reality; police don’t take these cases seriously, with dominant castes often having connections in high places or threatening the victim’s family.

In the Hathras case, police burned the victim’s body — without familial consent — before the trial. Then, they backtracked on the rape allegation, claiming that there was no evidence of rape from the postmortem report, citing forensic samples collected several days after the crime. “The FSL (Forensic Science Laboratory) report hasn’t found sperm in samples, making it clear that some people twisted the matter to stir caste-based tension,” Additional Director General of Police Prashant Kumar told reporters. But a medical report from the hospital where the victim was first admitted after the attack reported “that doctors had recorded “complete penetration,” as well as evidence of use of force.

If the Hathras case is anything to go by, the truth about caste rapes — the frequency with which they occur, how often they are registered by police, and how often they make it into India’s legal system — is a long way out.

The responsibility lies on the media to inform the public of the realities on the ground when it comes rape in India. At the end of the day, it’s the lesser-reported rapes that need our attention, and with the same fervor that we feel toward more-publicized and sensationalized cases. Caste crimes are even more ignored, both legally and in terms of media coverage, allowing them to continue unabated.

It’s in these lesser-discussed rapes where victim blaming takes over, perpetuating rape culture. Only with more coverage and discourse around these cases can we examine a bigger picture of how women belong in the patriarchal framework in India: as wives, daughters, sisters, and strangers, who are always seen as lesser than men and never as individuals themselves.